… and the Pursuit of Happiness - Institute of Economic Affairs

happiness is not within the government’s remit
9 Happiness is not within the
government’s remit: the
philosophical flaw in happiness
economics
Pedro Schwartz
Utilitarianism is the watermark of British social philosophy.
Though not always fully explicit it is ever present as a fallback
position. One must be thankful to Lord Layard, one of the main
champions of happiness economics, for making his kind of
Benthamism explicit: a utilitarianism that assumes that the feeling
of happiness is a value that trumps all other social goods. As such, I
will concentrate my attention on Layard’s utilitarianism. A contribution
to the critical evaluation of happiness economics is all the
more urgent since this viewpoint has become fashionable not only
among socialists in search of a mission but also among conservatives
in denial of individualism. I will try to show that Layard’s
fundamental utilitarianism has three unwelcome consequences:
first, that by elevating happiness to the rank of the supreme value
of social life he commits the naturalistic fallacy and thus unduly
narrows the field of normative economics; secondly, that by
making happiness a public good he unnecessarily invades civil
liberties and joins those who fail to distinguish between negative
freedom and positive freedom; and thirdly, that he conflates the
morality of personal relations within small groups with the ethics
of the Open Society, when in large societies progress demands
competition rather than contentment. The conclusion is that a
happy society should not be an aim of public policy.
Layard’s utilitarianism
In the third of his Robbins Memorial Lectures (2003), Layard
defends the need for a comprehensive moral theory to guide us
in everyday life and in situations of moral difficulty. He points
out something that is true, namely that today ‘there are no agreed
concepts of how unselfish a person should be or of what constitutes
a good society’; but he assumes that the good society needs
a unifying moral theory, something which is arguable, to say the
least. He notes that present-day philosophers offer no overarching
theory that would help us to resolve all our moral dilemmas.
Instead, he says, they support various separate values: ‘promisekeeping,
kindness, truthfulness, fairness and so on’. To fill the
need for a unifying principle of personal and social morality he
proposes Bentham’s classical utilitarianism. As he says: ‘I want
to suggest that the right concept is the old Enlightenment one of
the greatest happiness. The good society is the one where people
are happiest. And the right action is the one which produces the
greatest happiness’ (ibid.).
Lord Layard thus bases his happiness economics on a
Benthamite foundation: in our societies we should not value
productive efficiency or economic growth or individual liberty
in themselves but should seek to maximise the overall amount of
happiness. 1 The negative externalities of rivalrous behaviour and
1 Layard seems to be unaware in his Robbins Lectures (2003) of the fact that utilitarianism
at the present time has come in for heavy criticism by many authors who
are as keen as he is for government to display active public policies in the promotion
of the good society. He only mentions Sen’s strictures on mere addition of
individual happiness in Lecture III, when Sen’s capability approach (1999) goes
far beyond classical utilitarianism, to say nothing of Rawls’s demand that in the
good society a minimum of the all-purpose means (including income and wealth)
that individuals need to pursue their interests and to maintain their self-respect
as free and equal persons should be supplied (1999).
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